Benchmarking Manufacturing plant performances: Development of a customized model for the Italian Industrial Laundry Sector

Italian Laundry sector have been interested in latest years by an outstanding industrialization process towed by the increase in technology and automation of machineries. This fast growth highlighted the spread lack of a proper industrial culture among the laundries in managing the evolution of work organization from a traditional conception toward an industrial. Since the evolution started, University established a strong cooperation with Italian Industrial Laundry Association (EBLI, the association among Assosistema, the Italian industrial association of this sector, and the sector unions) in order to steer in a proper way the industrialization of the sector and support laundries in developing the necessary industrial culture. This paper concerns the realization of a Research Project for the definition of a benchmarking model amid Laundries. The project lies in a broader cooperation among EBLI and University through a customized performance measurement model and its dissemination program was realized. The elaboration of benchmarking is now necessary for each laundry to understand its weak points and strong points so as to continue to drive properly the improvement process of the whole sector. In the first part of the paper Authors will present briefly the industrial contest and how Benchmarking Project is linked with the previous collaboration projects. The second part of the paper will focus on benchmarking model definition. The last part of the paper will show the required steps to implement benchmarking properly, the main analysis tools to investigate performances of both single laundry and the whole sector and the next steps that will be carried out by University and EBLI to ensure industrial culture development inside the sector.